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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Blowout/COMC/eBay Blowout 2012: Day 2: King of the Hill

Well, I'm skipping over the Blowout package for today. Why? My eBay haul came in today and I'm even more excited about that. You'll see why in a minute.

Raise your hand if you think my preference for collecting Rich Hill is a secret around here. Yeah, that's what I thought. So, I found myself doing my usual inspection of Hill's stuff on feeBay last week when I noticed a printing plate that looked interesting. I decided to follow it since the price was certainly right, then proceeded to check out the seller's other stuff, which certainly makes it easier to justify buying from someone there. To my great surprise, he had a ton of Hill card all ending within about an hour or two of each other. To my even greater surprise, quite a few of them were plates! In going back and forth with him about payment and shipping I learned that he used to collect Hill himself but decided to dump his collection recently, to my great benefit.

I threw the ones I liked the most on my watchlist, then the evening they were all going to end, I hunkered down and prepared to battle the snipers. I missed out on the first one because I was too late in getting my bid confirmed on my tablet, so I sadly watched that one sell for a song. (meaning a song plus $0.50 would have won it for me) More determined, I pounced on the others I wanted and won all four of them. Then I saw one last card that was sitting on $0.99 with just minutes remaining. To my amazement, I was the only bidder. I then got the seller to combine shipping ($3 x 5 adds up pretty quickly) and less than $40 later, partially due to my eBay bucks, I came away with these absolute gems:

2006 Topps Magenta and Yellow Printing Plates: Well, once I won the first one, I had to get the other, right? I'm not the obsessed super-collector type, but if I happen to find the other pair of these for sale I'll go after them. Otherwise, I'll be thrilled to have a nice pair of plates from the same set.

2006 Topps Triple Threads Gold dual jersey auto: This was the $0.99 card I mentioned above, as you'd probably guess once you scan everything in the post because it's the only non-1-of-1. Still, the fact that this was the "worst" card I picked up says a lot about the rest. More importantly, you just don't pass up a steal like this, especially when you already have the Sepia version to pair it with.

2006 Ultimate Collection Printing Plates Magenta: If there was one card I was going to come out of these auctions with, it was this one. I had a bit of competition towards the end of the auctions, but most of the next-highest bids were still relatively modest. That didn't matter to me in this case, though, for one reason: I already have the black plate from the set. That means I now have two of four Hill plates in two different sets! That's pretty exciting to me.

2007 UD Masterpieces Strokes of Genius Windsor Green auto: "Big deal," you say, "you already have the base version of this one, the one you got from Sam. Why should I care?" I'll tell you why, my hypothetical friend: have a look at the back of that there card. See that handwriting on there? Yessir, that's a good old-fashioned hand-numbered 1/1. Nobody else has one of these and nobody else will while I'm still alive. What's funny is, while this was the most expensive card in terms of what I had to pay, I still only had to fork over $13.49 for a true 1/1 autograph! I just think that's awesome, but just as important, I think the card itself is outstanding since Masterpiece cards are great 110% of the time and the green border really adds something nice. Still, my favorite feature is probably the Michigan/Cubs blue hand numbering on the back. In many ways this may be my single best Hill, though it's so hard to choose.

After that little five-card spree I stand at 41 different Hill hits, the first of anyone in my PCs to break the 40 card barrier. It also puts me at almost 500 cards amongst all four major sports, keeping in mind I have a couple more on the way and a whole COMC package to cover! Finally, it puts me that much closer to my goal of 100 baseball hits, which shouldn't be a problem very soon.

Stay tuned in the next couple days for multiple posts covering the much-ballyhooed COMC haul plus at least one more Blowout card. And considering some recent developments have put me in position to work on several other rainbows, this may not necessarily be the end of the blowout, so stay tuned...

Thanks again as always. Are you seriously colorblind? Just curious because when you said it looked black I went back and looked at it thinking it had just scanned darker than it was, but it didn't. It's definitely just a Windsor Green border.